Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human

When you come back you will not be you. – E.M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’, 1957

independent,3 a more attentive friend or partner,4 care more for the environment,5 enhance your concentration levels, improve exam results,6 and feel more attractive to – well, whoever it is that you want to attract.7

H. van Praag, T. Shubert, C. Zhao and F.H. Gage, ‘Exercise Enhances Learning and Hippocampal Neurogenesis in Aged Mice’, Journal of Neuroscience (September 2005, 25:38), pp. 8680–5.

But how can we be expected to love running when the majority of adults in the West are no longer able to stand straight upright?

Recent research also shows that runners wishing to improve their speed should spend at least 80 per cent of their time at low intensity, so beneficial is it to heart, muscle, skeletal and neurological health.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. – D.H. Lawrence, letter to Ernest Collings, January 1913

Karen Danna and Ricky W. Griffin, ‘Health and Well-Being in the Workplace: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature’, Journal of Management (1999, 25:3), pp. 357–84; see especially p. 378, where they discuss the positive impact of regular exercise. See also Rachel Kaplan, ‘The Role of Nature in the Context of the Workplace’, Landscape and Urban Pla

Because we are upright, we are hit by less sun when it’s hottest.

We are becoming static and our bodies are neither built nor prepared for it.